Actually, she feels bad. But Trump is hardly the only person with adverb issues.

Words Work reader and Zion, Ill., resident Suzann Denlinger wrote us recently looking for some "ly" clarity.

"How about a column on how Midwesterners drop the -ly on adverbs all the time?" Denlinger wrote. "I never noticed this issue until college, when a friend of mine from the southern states made a comment about how we dropped the -ly all the time."

"She is playing the piano very loud," Denlinger offered as an example. "He walks very slow."

"If an adverb answers 'how' and can have an -ly attached to it, place it there," says grammarbook.com, the online companion to Jane Straus' "The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation."

The site offers a helpful primer on when—and when not— to add -ly. Some highlights:

• "She thinks slowly. (Slowly answers how she thinks.)"

• "We performed badly. (Badly answers how we performed.)"

• "She thinks fast. (Even though fast answers how she thinks, there is no such word as fastly.)"

There is one caveat, however. And this is where Trump tripped.

"If the verb is one of four senses—taste, smell, look, feel—don't ask how. Instead, ask if the sense verb is used actively. If so, attach the -ly. If the sense verb is not used actively, which is more common, don't attach -ly."